Title: Get BizMarketing? Nah, We Got BizMarketing
Guest: Emily Caddell
Peter: I am Peter Wilson, president of biz marketing.com, i’m joined by the director of marketing Emily Cadel.
We’re gonna have a conversation about our rebrand.
Emily: Not only are we rebranding the business as a whole, but we’re also rebranding our podcast. Maybe if you wanna start about the of the business and then maybe talk about the rebranding of the podcast a little bit
Peter: 13 years ago, I thought it was clever that I could get this domain name biz and then MKTG, which is marketing for short. So at the time I thought, wow, that’s pretty cool. We can just be biz marketing, or as my kids said, biz marketing. And it served us well for 13 years.
However a lot of folks were getting hung up on the name, it was difficult, especially when you’re having a phone call with somebody to give them your email address. It’s like, it’s B-I-Z-M-K-T [00:01:00] g.com and I can’t tell you how many times people were like, is that m.
TKG, or I think it was an itch that we needed to scratch and we’d probably been feeling it for a couple years, and we have recently. Been looking at our packages and just our business and our brand overall, and decided that we were going to , rebrand in a way that made it easier for people to identify with us and say our name.
Honestly, that really was the main, thing. And we also wanted to figure out a way to drop the.com. Out of our name
so I guess the main goal was to simplify, clarify our marketing and just make it easier. To say easier for people to think about. And then the last piece would be easier for customers of ours to relate to in terms of [00:02:00] like, when they think of us, they don’t think of this jumbled up, , consonant salad of our name.
They, it’s very easy to think about. That’s what prompted it. . It was , 12 years of building frustration and an opportunity.
Emily: What are, the steps to the process that you think are important to highlight? Just ’cause it, it is a, it is a big process, even though, . Maybe people don’t think it’s that different of a name. It is very different for us. So maybe what does that, what did that process look like for us to come to this end point of biz marketing?
Peter: the first goal was to actually have the word marketing fully in our name.
That was just no more mktg.com. And I’ve been collecting domain names, um, over the years as one does as a nerd. We had some that spelled out biz marketing, with, different words in front of ’em. . We started looking at the list of names or the domain names that we had in place.
[00:03:00] We own, go Biz Marketing, spelled out, get Biz Marketing spelled out, biz Marketing, USA. One Biz Marketing. So we have all these different iterations of biz marketing, but we have always been known as biz marketing. Like that’s the way that people refer to us. We landed on one, and this was about three months ago,
Emily: Yeah, probably about that.
Peter: so we landed on Get Biz Marketing and that we had that domain, so we were all ready to do. Get biz marketing and we had our designer working on some logos with the get kind of in a scripts get and then biz marketing and so we were set to go, ready to go. And funny thing happened on the way to the finish line.
I happened to be looking again at Biz Marketing, dot com, [00:04:00] and realized something had changed on the web with it and it appeared that maybe the domain had a new owner and they had an opportunity on their website to, run an ad.
Like a banner ad and I’m like, okay, great. If we could put a banner ad for our get biz marketing on biz marketing.com Wow, that would be cool.
a form on the website and the person who was had the domain at the time got back to me and said, yeah, we could, you could do advertising if you want.
Also, this domain is available if you’re interested. I was like, what? So I tried not to get too excited about it and, , said that would be amazing if we could get that. And we did Secure Biz Marketing all spelled out One word. No getting it no go, no one, no nothing, just. Plain old biz marketing.com.
So [00:05:00] we were able to secure that domain and that was obviously the catalyst. We weren’t gonna use get biz marketing anymore, if we could just have plain old biz marketing. that was, exciting and kind of a shock to some of our team members. ’cause they thought we were going to get this marketing.
So it was really exciting and we were just within. Days of pulling the trigger on get biz marketing.
Emily: Oh
Peter: yeah, we got it. We got it.
Emily: Woo. Lots of celebratory excitement over here. We were all pretty pumped, a lot of relief I would say of get Biz sounded good. We were ready to move forward with it, but like as soon as we realized we could get biz marketing, it was like, oh, that’s us. That’s who we are. And it just felt much more meant to be, I would say.
Peter: once we got the, domain, we quickly shifted gears with our designer.
And had her revised the designs that she was working on I’ll show you our new logo. One of the things that she [00:06:00] was able to keep was the biz part of our logo, which we really liked.
So this is our website and you can see the logo here. We kept, this was, this biz is exactly like our designer had put together maybe five, six years ago, but then we had our. Logo was not this kind of square shape, it was more of a horizontal biz. And then in black lettering mktg.com, and it went over this way.
And what’s nice about this is we were able to keep the biz piece and then we just put marketing right underneath there. So it fits together very nicely. So the biz is very bold. And the marketing, it just looks like a badge, right? I’d like to have a patch with that on it, put it on my jacket or something, you know, it just, or a hat, Tucker hat [00:07:00] or something.
It just looks really cool.
Emily: Yeah.
Peter: The thing I like about this logo is this is not just run of the mill lettering or font here. This was actually a custom design font that our then designer created, and then she was able to integrate elements, of it with this marketing under here.
So she, I think she did a really good job of making it. Match and work. It’s a very, I would say, kind of a modern design. And one of the things that we did keep, so a couple things. We kept, we kept the biz and we also kept the black, the red and black, of our core design. So that didn’t change. We’ve had that since the beginning,
Emily: Yeah. Oh yeah. That’s great. Yeah. Have you gotten much response from clients or past clients that just are like,
Peter: We put out an email that said, , spoiler alert we rebranded
and [00:08:00] got a lot of a lot of real positive feedback from folks on that. A lot of people, I put something on LinkedIn, I had a massive amount of response from that. A lot of folks are giving us thumbs up.
Emily: Yeah.
Peter: We’ve always been called biz marketing, right? And we’ve always called ourselves biz marketing. So it’s just more of a refinement of our brand rather than just a complete rebrand. It’s more of subtle. Nuance change, which in a lot of cases for companies that are looking to rebrand, I don’t think companies need to completely throw out everything that they’ve worked with.
Um, I think it’s really important to try to incorporate what you have, what’s worked,
Emily: Exactly.
Peter: just update, which is really what we’re doing here.
Emily: Exactly. Yeah, I completely agree. And maybe along that line, I think we probably learned some lessons that we could have done better along the [00:09:00] way do you have any lessons that really stick out
Peter: The biggest one is um, it’s better not to be clever. And I always thought coming from a corporate, I. World. I, you know, worked in corporate world for the first 25 years of my career, and I just thought everybody would know, oh, MKTG. That’s short for marketing, right? But not everybody
got it. And a, it’s better to be, plainly obvious than clever.
The only other advice is you’ll know when it’s time.
Emily: Yeah.
Peter: You’ll know. When it’s time and it was just, was very obvious to all of us. It’s time to do something different.
Emily: Definitely.
Peter: The other thing that we’ve got in store, is we are rebranding this podcast. We’re rebranding the podcast from Business Life Done Well with Peter Wilson to the field [00:10:00] Guide. By biz marketing. So the field guide connotates an adventure and it, has an outdoor field to it.
Field guide I think of this notebook here, right? And I think of a field guide. It’s like a set of notes that you’re gonna use while you’re actually out in the field trying to do something. So it’s practical. It’s timeless, it’s like this is the actual notes of, what you do when you go here.
Like, I fish a lot, and I’ve got a lot of, uh, notes on fishing in different places, right? And it’s kind of like that field guide. What do you do when you’re here? So that’s gonna translate into the podcast with respect to interviewing a lot more businesses and their stories. I really wanna lean into that. Try to focus as much as possible on real stories of real businesses and individuals that have had success [00:11:00] and failure along their journey. And what they’ve learned
Emily: yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to the rebrand of that. Very excited about our biz marketing rebrand. We’ve just got a lot of excitement going on over here, big
Peter: Yeah, for sure. Cool. Well, hey, thanks for joining me today. Can’t wait to, uh, dig into uh, more of this as we go.
